Page 107 of Accidental Alliance

He must have known he was walking into a trap. That at some point, he would no longer be around to protect me.

That night, he had not been showing me off. He had been testing whether I could survive without him or not.

Elio continues, his voice growing a little more gravelly. “The final entry was dated the night he died. Alessio called and gave him one last chance to choose sides. Your father chose you and your family, and Alessio had him killed for it.”

I stare at him for a long time. “Why?”

Elio is quiet for a while. When he lifts his eyes, they look sad. “For a monopoly of power. He has spent the last eight years convincing all of us that it was someone else’s doing. He wanted to take what your father would never have willingly given him.”

For eight years I have carried my father’s death as a wound of abandonment even though I know that is unfair. Grief is rarely reasonable. It makes children out of all of us. Some deeply traumatized part of me has always been angry with him for dying. That he left me with enemies, questions, with a legacy that could never decide whether it wanted to crown me or bury me.

But now another truth pushes through. He tried. He tried to prepare me, and I had no idea I was being loved in the language of war.

I swallow hard, forcing my voice steady. “And you expect me to believe you discovered all of this and suddenly had a change of heart?”

Elio’s jaw tightens, shame flickering across his face for the briefest moment. “I was blind, Isabella. I chose the syndicate over you because I believed it was the only way to protect you from the chaos. I convinced myself that distance would keep you safe. I was wrong. Everything I sacrificed was built on lies.”

A bitter laugh presses at my throat, but it dies before reaching my mouth.

He shifts in the chair. The cuffs bite at his wrists but he doesn’t seem to care. His eyes are still focused entirely on me. “I can’t ignore the truth anymore. I won’t watch Alessio come for you or Matteo again. I came here alone because I am offering myself to you, and to Davide, as leverage. Use me however you want, just… let me stay here so I can help end this war before it swallows what’s left of both our lives.”

For a moment, I can only stare at him.

This is not the controlled underboss who walked away without a goodbye eight years ago or the man who’s kept me at arm’s length since ripping me away from my new life.

This is the man who once held me in that room inside the safehouse and kissed me like he meant it, like every brutal thing in him had gone quiet for one impossible moment because I had given him a reason to believe there might be more to life than duty and obedience.

This is the man who once whispered about nurseries and rings, about a future without our families’ names written in blood on opposite sides of the same grave.

Nearly a decade ago, he said those things to me with his hands in my hair and his forehead pressed to mine. He spoke so softly, I could almost pretend the world outside that room did not exist. All that mattered was the foolish, golden possibility of us.

I push up from the chair and slowly move around to the other side of the table.

His eyes track my movement, his hands still visible, posture tense but accepting, as if he has already decided that whatever I intend to do to him, he has earned it.

I move slowly around the table, each step feeling like a mistake I am choosing with full knowledge of the damage it will inevitably cause. His gaze never leaves me.

Not once.

It follows me with a kind of aching caution that makes my throat tighten.

When I stop in front of him, I can see the bruises more clearly. Faint traces of his fight with Alessio. Evidence that blood has already turned against blood, that the Conti family is no longer the disciplined machine they want the world to fear.

I lift my hand and Elio goes utterly still. For half a second, I think I might slap him. I imagine it vividly, the crack of my palm against his face.

The satisfaction of watching his head turn from the force of everything I never got to say. Eight years of grief and silence, of raising his son while he remained a ghost with a living pulse.

I should slap him.

Part of me desperately wants to.

Instead, my fingers touch his jaw lightly.

The shock of it moves through both of us.

His breath catches as I cup his face gently, my thumb brushing just beneath the line of bruising. His skin is warmer than I’m expecting. For years, Elio has existed inside me as memory, a figure preserved in the cold amber of betrayal.

Touching him now is a brutal reminder that he is real. That the man who ruined me beyond repair is sitting beneath my hand, tired and aching and looking at me like I am the last thing left standing in a city burned flat to the ground.